OUR APPROACH

Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and led by the International Food Policy Research Institute, POSHAN (Partnerships and Opportunities to Strengthen and Harmonize Actions for Nutrition in India), is a multi-year initiative that works to reduce the data and evidence gap in nutrition in India.

Phase I

POSHAN commenced its activities in September 2011, with the goal of generating, synthesizing, and mobilising nutrition data and evidence, by engaging a variety of stakeholders, to support strategic nutrition policy and program actions in India. During the first phase (September 2011 to December 2016), its activities were organized under two broad objectives:

• Analysing direct and indirect nutrition-relevant interventions to generate knowledge on optimal approaches to address major bottlenecks to improving maternal and child nutrition outcomes in India; and
• Mobilising evidence-based and actionable knowledge to inform policy and support program planning for nutrition at the national level and in 3-4 key states.

POSHAN’s work during this phase was mostly anchored around four thematic areas:

• Intersectoral convergence between nutrition and health to deliver direct nutrition interventions, especially in the context of ICDS restructuring and emerging nutrition missions
• Assessing multisectoral planning and action for nutrition in India in different contexts
• Strengthening evidence for implementing essential nutrition interventions at scale
• Strengthening the generation and use of data and evidence.

In its first phase POSHAN collaborated with the following partners for various national and state-level engagements:

• Institute of Development Studies, Sussex (IDS)
• Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI)
• Nutrition Coalition
• Save the Children, India
• Vikas Samvad
• Public Health Resource Network
• Vatsalaya.

 Phase II

In its second phase now (September 2016 – December 2020), POSHAN continues to play an active role in bringing data and evidence together to support policy and program decisions to accelerate reductions in maternal and child undernutrition in India. The objectives of POSHAN II, with a stronger focus on state-level engagements, are to

• analyze nutrition outcomes, policies, and programs at the state-level to identify state-level success stories in tackling malnutrition;
• generate analytics and evidence to support policy and programmatic decisions for nutrition at both the national and state level; and
• invest in communications and stakeholder engagement to mobilise evidence and in capacity strengthening to increase demand for policy-relevant data and evidence.

In view of the above-mentioned objectives, POSHAN’s activities are organized under three workstreams:

• Workstream 1: Success stories in nutrition;
• Workstream 2: Data analytics and implementation research; and
• Workstream 3: Stakeholder engagement.

In its second phase, POSHAN collaborates with several partners on several aspects of its work, ranging from research to capacity building (listed below). Please email us at IFPRI-POSHAN@cgiar.org if you would like to know more about partnering with us on research, capacity building or policy support!

• Accountability Initiative
• Alive & Thrive
• Azim Premji Philanthropic Initiatives
• Duke University
• Emory University
• Evidence for Policy Design (EPoD)
• IDinsight
• IFMR LEAD - Leveraging Evidence for Access and Development
• International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3iE)
• Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy for Administration
• Network for Engineering and Economics Research and Management (Neerman)
• NITI Aayog
• Tata Trusts
• UNICEF India
• University of California, Berkeley
• University of California, San Francisco
• University of South Carolina.

To know more about POSHAN, please download our brochure.